Unmistakeable
by Garmonbozia
Summary: 221B drabbles from after the Fall. A dead man travels the world, tearing down the terrible ruins Moriarty left behind. Now complete.
1. Alpha

[I work with the phonetic alphabet everyday. The kind used by police and soldiers. They're words that represent letters so as to be unmistakable over a radio - eg. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie... No errors, no equivocations, no excuses. That's what made me think of Sherlock out in the world, staying dead, trying to destroy Moriarty's network. I usually wouldn't post chapters so short as this, but I promise they'll be regular, if you care to keep an eye. Hearts, as ever - Sal]

Alpha

The bloody dog keeps following. Black as oil, but its eyes catch the streetlight and burn. He's not even out of London yet and the bloody dog keeps following. It never gets close to him, but it's at his heels, following. Never barks, but it growls constantly, slavering. It tosses its head and flashes white teeth that look hungry, like they want his ankle between them, but it never gets close enough.

Holmes won't stop, won't try and get rid of it. Despite all appearances, it means him no harm. And in a way it seems almost meant to be there. Fits.

As he walks away from everything he's ever known, he's hiding everything. His face, his name, the very fact that he is alive, these were all buried with another man's body. And what has he now? Only a cold sort of a rage. It doesn't burn, doesn't bark loud and announce itself, but it's there, and all the stronger for it. It's the sort of rage that won't tear the world tooth and claw. No, rather it will dismantle it, slowly, carefully, remove every strut and support until it _collapses_.

And if that's all he has, if that's what he carries out into the world of the dead, then he should use it, and teach the dog to bite.


	2. Bravo

You'd never think it to look at her. The Paris Opera's latest diva is far too young, has far too much of an innocent glow in her face, to be the sort of monster Holmes knows she is. He can't help but think for a moment she's almost too young and innocent to be singing Verdi's Lady Macbeth. But perhaps that's the point. Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it.

Between acts, lingering over that interesting interpretation of the character, he slips out of his box and makes his unobtrusive way backstage.

The Mademoiselle has changed dresses, and is changing headpieces, when he opens her dressing room door.

"_Excusez-moi, monsieur, mais je ne veux pas voir n'importe qui juste encore_."

"Quite a feat," he says, "having your rivals bumped off, one by one. No one suspected you, did they?"

But there's nothing. Not a glimmer of guilt or a lie or even recognition. No damned spot upon her soul.

She _ordered_ nothing. Anything that was done for her was done without her knowledge.

Would that Moriarty had been satisfied to stay a patron of the arts.

During her final scenes, he watches her soar, and the stage lights seem almost to shine brighter because of her. He understands. When she leaves the stage, he leaves the box.


	3. Charlie

Holmes sighs. He would have thought they'd moved on a bit from the simple science of drug trafficking. At any rate, he's never known a real drug baron to _need_ any outside help. They come up with some really very clever things, and all from inside. They filled banana boxes, and when those got cracked open they started filling bananas, injecting crude product beneath the skins. They've used coffee and chilli and chemical compounds to turn cocaine into plastic and back again. They've stitched it into dogs and sheep and cattle, dug tunnels, hollowed out the hidden parts of cars, and bought the forces sworn to stop them.

But he has to admit, he's combed this hangar in the last few hours and he can't see the coke.

Neither do the Federales who come bursting in to raid the place and give the whole game away.

Oh, yes, it _looks_ like a drug-running operation. It has all the hallmarks, down to the Colombia-registered light aircraft dominating the space. It's even staffed like one, full of security and listening posts and the sort of tech geeks the SIS can't afford to keep. Matter of fact, it's got about everything but the drugs.

See, the Federales are here.

And the boats full of coke are skimming out like little pebbles across the bay.


	4. Delta

A body appeared in Virginia. Judging by the level of decomposition and certain aspects of flora found on the corpse, Holmes has tracked it here. Way down in the South, a lonely marsh between rivers, a tattered huddle of trees. Barring the occasional insect, nothing moves.

A former cotton gin, beaten and rotted to silver shingle. It looms large, condemnable. It smells of bayou mud and the rotten things that are sucked down into it, preserved forever in their pains. Of course, that's not Holmes' manner. Leave that sort of talk to the charlatan ghost hunters.

But the dead man wasn't Southern. And why bring someone all the way here to kill them and then send the corpse across states and states?

The building is hollow inside, where all the machinery has been torn out of it. And there is a shadow, a darkness, in the centre of the floor and this is very strange, because the ceiling above it is torn away.

He climbs the stairs, and they take his weight. Looks down from the gallery and sees. He has not found a murder scene, but a killing floor. Butchery. Meatsafe. Abbatoir. That great circle on the floor holds the final agonies of far, far more than one victim. The darkness is not an absence of light, but a bloodstain.


	5. Echo

Between Moscow and Beijing, Holmes warily drowses. He doesn't like to sleep, but the ride is long, and the Trans Siberian Express is swaying and smooth, and there is only flat, unpopulated tundra beyond the windows. There is, however, a little boy running up and down the carriage, and every time he passes the door he helps keep Holmes awake.

While the boy is at the other end, he almost sleeps, and there's a black, smoky London rearing up exaggerated in his mind, but then the boy runs by.

He goes away again, and this time it's a bright, blinding version of the lab at Bart's, and a sort of distant ghost is trying to resolve itself into a shape he'll know, but he's holding it off, and then the boy runs by.

It happens again, and the walls in the memory are darker this time, and patterned, and partially obscured by clutter and newspaper clippings, and in what would be a dream if he would sleep, there is someone in the other room about to come out, but the boy runs by.

The boy falls, this time. Hurts his knee.

Out of another cabin his mother comes running. Her exact words; "Let me get a look at it." The parent as doctor.

Holmes sleeps, and dreams, between Moscow and Beijing.


	6. Foxtrot

In little cells all over the world the bored rich and the zealous young and the evil few will gather and pay to hunt what is known as the most dangerous game. It's an old horror story and as soon as the unlucky fox is reported missing by a friend or loved one, the jig is up.

Holmes first met the hunters in Bratislava. After weeks of flirting around the idea, he paid his money and got himself invited.

But as he went to them, in their plush clubhouse, with more acceptable trophy heads on the wall, there was another door.

There was a young man sitting slumped on the edge of a bare pallet bed. Drifting eyes, relaxed. Broken and defeated, yes, but not by this place. Not under any duress. A doctor with blank eyes, oddly matte as though painted on, was checking him over. Pulse, blood pressure, the usual. Reciting, in a bored voice; "You understand the rules?"

"Yes."

"You will be given a dose of methamphetamines before we send you out. Remember, they've paid highly for this privilege. You must give them a hunt before you can be rewarded."

Holmes reeled as it dawned on him. The most dangerous game perfected; all parties compliant.

"And then I get it quick, right? I get it with a bullet?"


	7. Golf

For just a little while, in Italy, he 'owned' a very old and much ridiculed little car. Purchased without papers it was chosen because it had an engine and was available.

One night, spying on a fence just outside Venice overnight, he left it parked under a country bridge, all locked, out of sight. He returned at dawn to find it beaten so severely that could never have recovered even had it not been set on fire.

He missed it.

Of course, there were rational explanations for such an irrational reaction. There had been a degree of freedom in owning it, and it had made travel much easier, and it was good for storage, and stakeouts, and getting away very quickly if somebody caught him watching. It had been a bloody useful vehicle, that was all. That was it. That was why.

But he never took another car.

The Italian adventure remained an isolated incident. Frankly, he was disgusted with himself. This is what happens when you develop emotional attachments. The object will be taken away and leave you crippled and incapable of replacing it. In Holmes' experience, the moment you can't remember what life was like without someone, that's the moment you'll be called upon to walk away from them. That's how you end up alone. Or taking the bus.


	8. Hotel

It has been named, most inventively, the Hotel California. It's a dark little building off the highway, built almost entirely out of contradictions. The sign on the road always says 'Full'. But there are check-in records almost every day. Constant check in records. Always somebody arriving, and there is always an empty room for them. And yet there is no register for guests checking out.

Most worryingly of all you have to get a reservation from a half-blind little man in a Los Angeles basement, and even meeting him costs over a thousand dollars.

When Holmes gets to the desk they know him and have only one question. "North, south or west?"

Canada, Mexico or East Asia.

Two steps through the door and mystery solved. But he decides he might be best to take advantage of the offer. "West," he says. He has contacts in Tokyo, Hong Kong and work to do over there. He can dismantle this place just as well from across the ocean.

Trafficking criminals. Let it never be said Moriarty didn't take care of his people.

While he waits for nightfall and his lift, Holmes has a room to wait in. Plain, but nice. He could almost have relaxed her, except for the noises on the other side of the wall, and wondering who it might be.


	9. India

In Mumbai, there is a third rush hour. Just around sundown, the streets fill again as workers make the journey from their evening shift in one job to graveyard in another. Countless thousands moving seamlessly from day into night, sixteen hours straight. They live on packed lunches and coffee breaks, and that's just those who are lucky enough to get them.

Holmes watches the jam with something that stops just short of interest. A morbid fascination, perhaps. He observes, but does not think about, the other lives that go on around it. Millions of children run the streets, some half-dressed, most half-fed. This time of night there are dealers in white American shirts and Italian jeans, out to walk streets they own, to say hello to the scant few policemen scattered through the whole of this sprawling, haphazard city.

This isn't what he's here for. Not even related. He's come to speak to a contact's contact about elephant poaching, of all things. No, it's just that he's waiting and it's caught his eye. They tell you India is a spiritual place. It could be true, but he can't see it.

Maybe he looks at things all wrong now. Maybe he's cynical and his vision is skewed. But Mumbai, to him, seems an ideal place for any sort of evil to bloom.


	10. Juliet

Juliet gave him a flyer as he sat over a coffee. He took it so she'd move on, but when he saw the bold black cross on it he crumpled it, dropped it down by his chair. And really, you'd think these people would be used to it, but she wheeled back. He settled in for the barrage, the railing against his close-mindedness, the God is Great, the God is Good, to hear that he is loved anyway.

None of that comes.

She sits down opposite him. He finds out her name when she draws it in the contents of a burst sugar packet.

"Something the matter?"

His reaction is delayed only because he's not used to that Sydney twang yet, or maybe because of the oppressive heat. That's all.

"Nothing. Thank you."

"Look, I'm not gonna pray at you or anything. You on holiday, Nigel?"

"Business."

"Ah, no wonder you look depressed. That's not a day for business, that's a day for the _beach_."

"So why aren't you at the beach?"

He meant the question to throw her off, to irritate, just to make her _leave_, but she doesn't. She smiles up at the sky for a second. "I will be, later. This is just how I say thanks first." She slaps the table as she gets up. "Feel better."


	11. Kilo

In a breezeblock hut at the edge of an Afghani field there are twenty parcels. They are relatively small, like you could send them in the post, tightly packed with something that nonetheless feels soft and shifting. They are mummified in thick tape, airtight. Each of them weighs precisely one kilogram, without the wrapping.

In this country, adjusted to U.S. dollars, the parcels retail at something around five grand.

They'll make their way across the world, with the majority headed for the richest, most developed countries. America, for instance. One goes to a small house in New Mexico, where it is weighed and measured. The man who weighs and measures it will say it is fifty grams short, and skim that much for himself. He'll get found out and then found dead.

The rest of the brick will be mixed with other powders. Milk sugar, baking soda, flour, Tylenol. And this new mix will be split into a lot of tiny packages, and each has its own price, and each will be sold. By the time the first hit goes to the head of the first junkie, the total value will be more than three hundred thousand dollars.

But it won't be any of these particular bricks, because Holmes visits. On the edge of an Afghani field a breezeblock hut burns.


	12. Lima

Holmes will maintain, until he reaches his more permanent grave, that there is no such thing as the perfect crime. Not in practice. Theory is one thing, but the practice depends on a human criminal. Humans leave traces, have motives, make mistakes. There is no such thing as the perfect crime because no criminal is perfect.

But the Death Mask incident came _bloody_ close.

The Incans imagined their kings as sunbursts and showers of gold, an image that was carried into the afterlife. In his second year dead, fourteen were gathered at the Museo de la Nacion, and fourteen vanished in a night.

No footprints, no fingerprints, no alarms, no CCTV. Not a trace.

_People_ keep a crime from being perfect. People like fences, who can't hold their tongue. People like buyers, who need to show off their new piece. All he has to do is wait. The traces, the evidence, will appear.

People like _thieves_ keep a crime from being perfect. Each Perspex case had had a smiley face drawn on its glass in fourteen different colours of permanent marker. Whoever it was, they might as well have screamed his name from the roof.

Still; fourteen large heavy masks of turquoise and gold simply faded from existence. A crime will never be perfect. He never said it couldn't be_ beautiful_.


	13. Mike

Three. Bloody. Days.

Three days. All of them. Days and nights, technically. Actually, it's into the fourth day now, midnight's been and gone. And he wouldn't _mind_, if there actually wasn't an answer, but the fact is everybody's had an answer and nobody's been right yet and Holmes is beginning to get the distinct impression that he's being _bloody_ messed about.

There is a man named Michael. He's a low-level link in a trafficking chain who may or may not be able to help him. And _Michael_ is nowhere to be found.

No, specifically, he's everywhere.

If you were to listen to all the so-called answers Holmes has gotten in the last _three_ days, you would begin to believe that Michael may in fact be capable of _at least_ bilocation. Recently, Michael has paid flying visits at no less than eighteen bars and clubs, spent time with four wildly different girlfriends, one of whom had very large hands and a deep, deep voice, and not once gone anywhere to sleep.

Michael may not be human. Or there may be more than one of him.

Or, and this is Holmes' preferred theory, he's being messed about. Coming into his fourth day, he does something he's never done before.

He stops on his way to the next red herring. Turns. Can't be bothered.


	14. November

[Inspired by and dedicated to the wonderful artistic stylings of doublenegativemeansyes over on Tumblr. I don't ship Johnlock _at all_. But if I thought it would be how it looks in those drawings? I think I could probably be convinced. DNMY's work makes my day whenever there's something new. I stole a bit of dialogue at the end, but i did it out of love!]

Prague in November is bitter. While he's travelling, he could follow summer south, but he never does. Instead, he lets winter bite the ends off his nose and fingers. Hidden in the dark of a hotel balcony, his breath comes in clouds, and watching the assassin sip coffee with the client across the street isn't helping.

Nothing's really helping, but he never goes south.

His thoughts drift. It's just the cold, getting to him. It's the snow starting to fall and obscuring his view so it's harder to concentrate. It's just the cold. But there was another night and his breath came in clouds. Up at the attic window, studying. Another November. He was sitting outside and, like a good boy, John was sent to fetch him in. And like a real bad influence, Holmes had him sitting out too, before long.

"You do know this is dangerous?"

"At two stories the chances of death from a fall is less than thirty percent."

"And you're happy with those odds?"

"They're in my favour. I ask for no more than that."

"What are you looking at out here?"

"Stars, John."

"It's London, Sherlock. There are no stars."

"Not in the sky. But there," he said, and pointed out at streetlights and headlights and advertising lights and the people moving through them. "Below."


	15. Oscar

This year's Academy Award for Best Actor went to an elderly performer who, though he had been nominated quite a number of times, had never won. This wasn't his most deserving role, but the years of defeat had accumulated and won it for him.

Holmes Googled all this when the award was stolen. Before that he'd hardly heard of the man. But he liked the idea of investigating. None of the Moriarty leads went there, but there are only a handful of thieves in the world who could manage a Hollywood mansion absolutely clean. It was _going_ to be a holiday for him.

Then the little statuette reappeared, just as suddenly and mysteriously as it had vanished. It came back to the wrong house, though, returning not to the veteran, but to some young upstart on his first nomination and who had, it is universally agreed, given the best performance of the year. The heist became an international joke, and that was Holmes's little rest all shot to buggery.

He didn't find it all that funny, himself. It almost seemed fair.

And what a soul, that criminal, to risk not only the police and prison, but the wrath of the celebrity culture, in order to make just a politicized travesty. After all, isn't that what the award is supposed to be?


	16. Papa

Out of all of it, the drugs and theft and murder and money laundering and trafficking and all of it, it's kidnapping Holmes despises above all else. Whether he has any scrap of respect left for human attachment is an irrelevant question. This business of taking other people very much to heart has become really very popular with or without his participation. And those who would exploit this strange and powerful notion are, in his eyes, the very worst there are.

In a wild Romanian forest, he found a pipe. A dark, narrow straw sticking up out of the ground. And in a shipping crate at the bottom of it, buried alive with three days' water, was a little boy gasping and crying for his father.

By the time the excavators reached the scene, all they could do was exhume.

There was a car down there on the road that hadn't come with the trucks, and Holmes knew he had to follow. That would be the kidnappers, confused; they had received no ransom and only come to clear out the body, leave the box empty for a new tenant. He had to follow.

And yes, yes, in the past he has stepped over the bodies of the fallen but never before, and please God never again, the body of a boy.


	17. Quebec

He had been beaten, and she was an elderly woman, rake-thin, with antiseptic and good tea. He forgets where this was. Sometimes he forgets. If he thought about the facts for a moment he'd know, but it doesn't matter enough to warrant it. She cleaned and bandaged his wounds, let him sleep. It meant he lost track of the case. It was hardly a disaster, though, he'd be able to pick it up again. That's what he told himself. He remembers hanging on the edge of waking up and telling himself that. Then waking up anyway.

Naturally, he asked if there was some way he could repay her. Nothing's free. He'd learned that long ago and only seen it true out here. But he could never have expected what she asked of him.

"I heard you before, speaking French at those ruffians..."

"Well, yes."

"I don't know a pick of French."

She took too long over too sad a story, telling how she once met a man from Canada, and how she was pregnant when he left her, and how the only note of explanation he left was in French. How she never had the heart to find out what it said.

"You want it translated?"

"No. I don't care what it says. I want to hear it in French."

"..._Bien_."


	18. Romeo

Circumstances. Circumstances and nothing more brought him back to Australia. As to what brought him to a bench opposite a ramshackle community centre in an area it is ill-advised to visit after dark, you could ask him, but he won't answer.

You see he found Juliet again. The Christian. The one who told him to Feel Better. He wanted to ask her... _something_. He feels like he knew at the time, can't think why he would have gone there if he hadn't. He triangulated her precise accent and deconstructed her approach to spreading the faith to deduce her denomination and then was able to find her through local Bible study groups. It's an awful lot to trouble to have gone to if he didn't know what he wanted to ask her.

That particular night she was helping run an art club for local children. They kept coming and going and he knew they were noticing him, knew it was the wrong sort of exposure. But he didn't move. Just waited.

He changed his mind when he saw her at the upstairs windows. She had green poster paint on her nose. Cut out against the light from inside. Canvas overalls smudged dark with charcoal. Laughing. He got up and began to walk away, leaving her and all that light on the balcony.


	19. Sierra

It's dark, and this high in the mountains even the nearby Mediterranean can't keep things warm. The observatory is empty tonight. It should be. There's nothing to observe. Not in the sky, anyway, nothing but clouds. That's how Holmes was able to sneak in, unseen. The telescope he has appropriated to the cause isn't the largest or most advanced her, but it shows him the woods at the base of the slope. And there's plenty going on down there.

Warheads shouldn't arrive in a Mini Cooper. There's something painful about watching it. Even worse when the money arrives in a Volkswagen Golf. For a moment he almost dreams he recognizes that car.

But they don't dream of him.

Never in the million years are they thinking there's a man, not a cop, not government, standing at a laboratory window taking them apart. And that is a strange and awful thought. He's almost had it before. A cold Spanish mountain and no stars and he can't put it off anymore.

But it doesn't make any different. It's alright. It doesn't hurt. He _did_ all of this to be invisible. It doesn't hurt.

And there's no point in getting hung up about it, when that Golf down there isn't even the right colour. It should be gunmetal grey. It is, in fact, blue.


	20. Tango

Damn, she's spotted him. He saw her from across the gallery floor and immediately turned to leave, but she's spotted him. Or spotted something; he catches her reflected in the glass of a framed painting and she's craning to see. She's seen something, knows and doesn't trust herself. Why should she, after all?

And still she tries to follow him, and leaves him wondering if Irene sees ghosts often.

He didn't know. He wouldn't have come here. Leave it. Let the thieves have their trinkets and let the woman have her peace and let him stay dead, stay nothing.

He wants to escape through the service exits, but they're all alarmed. That would make her sure. Even the fact that he's walking away from her is too much already. Outside, Holmes looks down the stone steps and either way down an empty street. Fine rain. Orange lights. All too clearly, he can hear his name being called down that street. He steps sideways instead, behind a pillar.

She comes out too fast to spot him. She's right at the top of the steps. And when she realizes she's lost him she turns. Walks the same way he did along the pillar. He slides around, staying on the far side of the stone, staying silent.

Irene heaves a sigh. Couldn't have been.


	21. Uniform

He probably should have known better than to visit the Middle East. There were certain, inevitable things he was going to see there and he really probably should have known better. But when he followed the political assassination track, this was where it brought him. He didn't _choose_ it, and he couldn't walk away from it just because it was difficult. If this was where a major operation was basing itself, then this was where he had to be.

It's just that almost everywhere he goes, he can make himself understood; he is usually surrounded by British military personnel.

What is difficult is that he's learning about them. He's getting to know a little of what their lives are like. And their lives, make no mistake, are hard. They are dusty and sunburnt and hated wherever they go. They are never safe, and have stopped even thinking about it. Those sorts of thoughts would kill you. Holmes knows that very well indeed. They have learned hard to depend on nothing; they band together to have something to rely on, and to keep from being lonely. Their attachments, yes, are easy, but their loyalty is not.

Holmes wishes they would all just go home. It's alright. They do too. But no kind of soldier gets to choose where they go to bleed.


	22. Victor

Like any traveller, when the road is hard, Holmes thinks of the end. In Marrakech, when the bomb goes off anyway, when the Uffizi ends up with an empty frame anyway, when the dead are beyond saving before he even knows their names anyway, he allows himself a cautious, healthy dream. He allows himself to believe that someday all the trails will end, and there will be no more. The constant hunting will be at an end, the seven day work, the exhaustion, all over, all finished. Someday he will have taken apart everything that still stands of James Moriarty and then he can rest in peace.

Pardon the pun.

There is, however, another dream. It's not so much that he allows it as it comes anyway, when he's weak. When, as he said, the dead are beyond saving before he even knows their names. When it's been too long and too alone and it hurts. In that dream there is a terrible monster that he has to fight. It goes on as long as it has to, that dream. It ends when he wins, when he reaches up and takes with his bare hands the heart from the creature's chest.

He dreams of victory when there is an end in distant sight, of monsters when there doesn't seem to be.


	23. Whiskey

Spying on another damned exchange, Holmes is tucked into a small booth, the back corner of a bare-brick basement, only watching. Nothing to it. He just needs to see the money change hands beneath the table and that's it. It's not tough. Heaven knows it hasn't been tough in a long time. It just keeps happening.

The waiter gets in the way, and Holmes is about to ask him to move when he realizes he means this table. Taking a squat, cut glass tumbler from his tray and moving to set it down.

"That's not mine."

"It is now. Lady at the end of the bar said you looked like you needed it. Said you looked cold, whatever that's supposed to mean."

Holmes doesn't even have to look. "There's no lady at the end of the bar."

The waiter looks up to point her out and falters. "Now where in hell did she..." But the drink is paid for, and Holmes needs him to move, so he takes the glass down anyway and settles to it.

As with all of his particular abstinences, there are a number of reasons why he doesn't touch the stuff. Chief amongst them it dulls the senses. Secondly, the former addict in him is always wary. And only one lady ever sent him a drink before.


	24. XRay

Military medical supplies were vanishing from a base near Seoul. Suspecting an extreme left cells in the area, in the sort of stupid action that could happen anyway, Holmes climbed a wall to gain perspective, ducked a low-flying bird and fell.

And because the bone broke the skin and because he couldn't help but shout, they shot him full of morphine. And that, for a brief time, was all there was.

Pay for that later. Not just them, but him. But in that moment, oh, God, it was good.

He fights to come to. Not because he wants to, but because the longer he leaves it, the worse it will be. And as he slowly comes round he starts to understand he's not in any official state-sanctioned hospital, but in the hands of those he had been investigating.

The doctor in the room wore no white coat, smoked so persistently he spoke with the cigarette waggling in the corner of his mouth, scattering ash over the floor. Placing two X-rays up on a papercraft light-box mounted on the wall.

"Wait," he manages, up out of the stupor. "Where the _hell_ did you get that machine?"

The sawbones turns suddenly sheepish. Lowers his head, then decides to dodge the question entirely. He cries out instead, "Aren't you glad it's a clean break?"


	25. Yankee

There was a cop who should have arrested him. Thailand, maybe, or Vietnam. That's another thing he could stop to think about, but he won't. And when he stopped him afterward and asked him why, the officer began to tell him about Dirty Harry and Bullitt and the great bounty hunters of the Western tradition. And he explained (in a childish, roundabout fashion), that the laws the governments of a country will lay down aren't always enough, or their enforcement is corrupt, essentially that there is always something getting in the way of real justice. And he wanted real justice more than anything. "One outlaw sheriff," he said, in admirable English, "must recognize another."

Quite aside from being the most ridiculous argument Holmes had ever had the displeasure to listen to, he found it stunningly naive.

"Listen to me," he began, and had to stop. Organizing his thoughts to do anymore than interrogate a suspect was getting to be foreign, awkward. He gave them some semblance of order before trying again. "Listen to me. You're not smart enough. You're going to get yourself killed. There is no such thing as an outlaw, and no such thing as a sheriff, not anymore and not here. There never were. They're only like that in films. Your hat isn't white, and theirs isn't black."


	26. Zulu

There was an unscheduled stop, along the return road to London, following reports of a tenement block full of protected criminals in Cape Town. Pinned down behind a battered Volvo with the commander of a private militia unit named Goetz, Holmes is beginning to think he maybe should have just bitten the bullet and gone home.

Goetz, confirming his place as the single most unpleasant man he's ever met, seems relatively unfazed by the standoff. He is, in fact, grinning, almost laughing. "Going to be a great afternoon, eh? Thanks for putting us onto this place." This is spoken without even a trace of irony. Holmes decides not to hear another word that leaves this creature's mouth and, in addition, not to think about London until he knows he's definitely going to see it again. Questioning himself. He could have sent somebody like Goetz from anywhere in the world. He didn't have to be here. Why, then, couldn't he just take a direct flight? What is it about returning he just can't face yet?

Goetz says something just strange enough to fight through when he doesn't want to hear. "'Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.'"

"I beg your pardon?"

"_Zulu_, bru." Holmes stares blankly back. "Michael Caine. You've never seen _Zulu_? And you call yourself a Brit..."

* * *

[Thanks for being with me. I've loved writing these. They're like prose haiku. It's been such an interesting exercise and if you've found even one you like, then I'm so glad. All the usual hearts -

- Sal]


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